Sunday, April 13, 2014

April 13 (BBC News Europe) On
Saturday, armed men took over police stations and official buildings in
Sloviansk and two other eastern towns - Kramatorsk and Druzhkovka. Similar
reports emerged from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk of armed men dressed in
camouflage arriving in buses and storming the police stations. Pro-Russian
demonstrators also continued their occupation of the main administrative
building in the regional capital Donetsk, which they have held for one week. A
protest leader told the BBC that the activists in Sloviansk took action to
support the Donetsk sit-in. Eastern Ukraine has a large Russian-speaking
population and has seen a series of protests since the ousting of Ukraine's
pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in February.

Ukrainian
forces have launched an operation against pro-Russian activists who seized a
police station on Saturday, the interior minister says. Arsen Avakov announced
on his Facebook page that "all security units" were involved in an
"anti-terror operation" in the eastern city of Sloviansk.

Russia warned earlier that any use
of force in eastern Ukraine could scupper crisis talks due later this week. The
US accuses Moscow of inciting the trouble. The Kremlin denies the charge. Russia's
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the Kiev government was "demonstrating
its inability to take responsibility for the fate of the country".

Four-party talks involving Ukraine,
Russia, the US and the EU are due to start in Geneva on Thursday. Busloads of armed men